ABSTRACT

BEYOND THE CAGE: UNDERSTANDING SYSTEMIC SAFETY DYNAMICS IN HUMAN-ROBOT COLLABORATION

Industry 4.0 entails introducing novel technologies into manufacturing, digitizing production, and enabling interconnected systems. These developments lead to increased automation and technological support for workers. However, the effects on working conditions and worker safety remain uncertain. The increased digitalization and inter-connectedness of manufacturing resources lead to increased complexity in organizational and technical systems. Coupled with the inherent unpredictability of human behavior, this introduces new hazards and risks within collaborative environments. As a result, new challenges in occupational health and safety arise. This complexity results in both traditional and emerging risks, with the human factor considered as the main link between these risks. However, there is a lack of methodologies and approaches to assess the influence of human factors.
Within the context of Industry 4.0, collaborative robots (cobots) are considered one of the enabling technologies. Unlike conventional industrial robots that operate in isolated cages, cobots are designed to work directly with human operators in shared workspaces. This collaboration between humans and robots opens up new possibilities for efficient and flexible manufacturing processes.
While cobots bring numerous benefits to the manufacturing industry, there are significant challenges related to their safety. The safety of collaborative workspaces involves physical design safeguards to avoid unintended contact and govern accessibility. However, the specific nature of cobots and their interactions with humans require a broader and system-wide or systemic perspective, considering human behavior and psychosocial factors, system components, and organizational aspects to cope with emerging risks.
The rapid introduction of cobot technology into workplaces has led to a lack of knowledge and understanding of this technology and its safety aspects. Furthermore, insufficient comprehension of safety standards and risk assessment poses a major hurdle to successful cobot integration across industries. These challenges contribute to a contradiction and tension in cobot safety, confusing practitioners considering cobot deployment. Moreover, the deployment of cobots has remained below expectations due to the safety concerns, lack of knowledge, and inadequate safety regulations and standards.
To address the challenges and to promote use of cobots, the Cobot Safety Readiness Assessment Tool (CSRAT) is proposed to evaluate and validate cobot safety readiness, or in other words to evaluate how aware and knowledgeable one is about cobot safety. The main topics that will be addressed in the presentation are briefly described in what follows. After some background on collaborative robots and their safety, it will be motivated why it is necessary to build
a). The main conclusion here is that cobot safety risk factors should be regarded from a broad, system-wide perspective and that safety plays an important role in cobot adoption. Insights from different stakeholder studies will be shared. The main learning from these case studies is that attention is needed for the way tasks are distributed between the operator and the robot.
The building of the CSRAT and the validation process will be explained, proving its effectiveness in enhancing cobot safety awareness, promoting discussions, and aligning stakeholder perspectives regarding cobot considerations and decisions. The presentation will conclude with some reflections on the potential in the further use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in robotics and to improve cobot safety.